Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 482 posts

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#311

Post by booleandilemma »

ta988 wrote: post #303
anvil-on-my-toe wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life so someone else can get rich.

So you say a salary above the median salary is not enough? This raises a big question of how is half the population in the country getting by.

I've been very confused about how people are getting by.

If they're not in tech, and and they're not a member of the professional class (doctor, lawyer, etc), how are they doing it?

Is everyone working two jobs and doing uber on top of that, or what? How much of a bubble am I in? I'm in tech and I feel like I'm barely making it.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#312

Post by BeFlatXIII »

isthispermanent wrote: post #134
l0b0 wrote: post #2

Working at a medium-size government org, 6 years into a reorg, with projects being cancelled after two years because nobody actually needs it, dropping rebuilds because they might overrun, not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be…

I can’t imagine the infosec, security department puts a moment of thought into the lived experience of dealing with all the security. And I get it, it is important, but I often think to myself that it seems like they don’t want me to get any work done and that must be why they put all these security hoops in front of me. I must spend an hour+ a day logging in and out of things, and then another hour waiting for secur…

Security like that is how companies end up with shadow IT and private State Department e-mail servers.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#313

Post by angarg12 »

On one side we have things like the efficient market hypothesis, that says that people are rational, they make logical decisions, and there is no room for inefficiencies.

On the other we might think that people who runs companies are blithering idiots who just got lucky, and their head is so far up their asses that they can't see they are headed to self-destruction.

Reality is somewhere in between.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#314

Post by thatfrenchguy »

ta988 wrote: post #303
anvil-on-my-toe wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life so someone else can get rich.

So you say a salary above the median salary is not enough? This raises a big question of how is half the population in the country getting by.

« Retire early » is the main part you’re missing from their argument, that implies saving large portions of disposable income. I always feel sad when people have high paying jobs they hate just so that « retire early » though, in a field like software engineering you can find a happy medium I feel like.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#315

Post by hotnfresh »

lapcat wrote: post #243
Draiken wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you. But it is. I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win l…

> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever. > So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice. Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.

The Americans retiring now didn’t work in the New Economy for most of their working life. Things were very different.

Let’s revisit this comment in 15 years or so.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#316

Post by Draiken »

lapcat wrote: post #302
Draiken wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x, more like 30x. > How is your nationality relevant to reading stats? If you don't want to, then just say that. Sorry maybe I wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I meant. I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of no interest to me. That's why I mentioned I'm not from the US. I know that for my country that's absolutely not the case and I'm pretty sure it's…

> 10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x, more like 30x. You appear to be overlooking Social Security, which is a crucial source of income that all US workers pay into their entire careers. It's not just savings. > I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of no interest to me. Yet it's interesting enough to you to make baseless empirical claims about the US. > I know that for my country that's abs…

Since you're so adamant I had a quick search and it turns out I'm right.

>43.09% of American adults had no retirement savings >23.15% of American adults had no (or negative) retirement savings even including the extended assets

https://dqydj.com/average-retirement-savings/

Of course you can rely on some government assistance but arguing that's a good enough standard is a bit of a stretch.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#317

Post by fbdab103 »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #262
addicted wrote: post #16

> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1…

Or increase sales from $1B to $1.001B, or increase efficiency of 1,000 of those employees by $1,000. If literally nobody is viewing a dashboard then it's probably useless, but even a small number of views could have very high value. Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do and…

I think there is something to be said for having sufficient staff to handle peak capacity. If you run a lean ship, you are likely to run into situations where existing resources cannot handle the demand and/or headcount attrition leaves you with a gap. It takes months to onboard someone and make them productive.

The flip side of that is the peons are not told the company over-hired and the headcount are being paid "just in case". Which leads to corporate shenanigans where BS work materializes to make people feel busy.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#318

Post by surajrmal »

djbusby wrote: post #224
antupis wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.

All of my friends at FB/G work way more hours than me and miss family activities. Same as when I was at MS.

The people who tend to work extra hours are the ones who choose to in my experience. If you don't work extra hours now you won't after switching to one of those companies either. You might witness folks who do, but you can usually tell they are more self motivated than they are forced into it.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#319

Post by booleandilemma »

achenet wrote: post #158
zmgsabst wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when you were right? Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you. We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what? Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and…

maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?

You didn't reference Fat Tony or use a made-up word, you're still ok!

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#320

Post by hotnfresh »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #202
lordnacho wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happ…

Capitalism in theory doesn't support jobs that produce no value. Shareholders would have demanded that waste be optimized out of the company.

Those lovely market forces largely stop applying at corporation boundaries.

Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces are fully in-play.

Post reply on HN